Right now it seems too easy to poach another coach's recruit, especially in the later recruiting cycles, and there seems to be a growing number of coaches gaming this and using late round poaching as their recruiting strategy.

This has got me thinking of how poaching might be made a little less easy in v3. Maybe ideas have already been put forth, but if not, I wanted to open things up for discussion.

One idea that has crossed my mind is to make it progressively more difficult to go after a recruit the longer he has been green for another human player. For example, maybe for the first two or three cycles a player has been green, there is no increase in the difficulty for another coach to come in and try to persuade him away. But with each cycle after that, it becomes just a little more difficult to pull him away.

I'm not saying that it should be made impossible, just more difficult. The degree of difficulty could be reflected in an increase in the cost of the different recruiting options, with said cost being incremented upward each cycle after the fair game period.

I don't think this would be out of line with the real world, either. I think it stands to reason that the longer a recruit is committed to a school, the less likely he is going to be to change his mind if/when another school comes calling.

I think the process of getting a player to go green should take longer. I don't like the idea of going in hard at first and being able to turn a player green. Make the process take the whole week. Make the process a competition to who can get a player interested by letters, calls, scouting, home visits and then finally narrow it down to the final decision of a campus visit contest. I don't like the late poaching either, but I also don't like the "he's green so he's mine" attitude.

I'm curious as to what guys are being poached. Undecided that you only have $1200 on or SIM recruits that you have say $6000 on. Only guys I've had even attempted to be poached are the undecided. Had 2 this year I had green in Cali (school is in KS) so it was obvious to the other coach 2-3k would probably flip him.

I've been known to poach a recruit on occasion, or just flip him yellow to keep my options open, but I don't throw big bucks at a green unless I really need him. I look at recruits that I know are vulnerable to flipping. As a rule of thumb, recruits outside your 360 are more likely to be targeted. The further out the recruit is, the more likely it is that you only have one CV or even one scout on the recruit. If you really want to keep the recruit, put an extra CV or two on him, or promise a start. Jack up his interest in your school a bit and make it a losing proposition for the poacher. It also helps to have plenty of backups.

I think to make it harder to poach, we just need to get norbert to increase the "compound interest" factor you get when a recruit is green. Right now, it seems that if you flip a guy green with an AC scout in the first cycle, another coach can turn him yellow with an AC scout in the last cycle. The first coach should generate more interest from keeping the guy green all that time. If the AC scout gave you 100 "mythical recruiting interest points", and your total increased by 5% for every cycle you kept him green, that 100 points would be doubled by signing day, so anyone trying to poach you would have to put in twice the effort to get to the same point you are at. That seems reasonable to me.

Currently, I think the very small adjustment is applied to anyone that has put money on the recruit, but I think it might be more balanced if only the coaches who have the recruits' interest (green or yellow) got the buff.

Maybe norbert could look into it? If the adjustment does in fact already exist, the percentages could probably be tweaked in the beta to see how it would work.

scrodz's reasoning is on the same track as mine. like him. regardless of how it might implemented (my original suggestion is but one possibility), i'd like to see some (or more) tangible benefit for keeping a guy green over a period of time.

right now, a player can sit back, let other coaches spend and deplete their money on scouting and early recruiting battles, monitor recruits and watch for targets of opportunity (e.g., recruits that he suspects didn't have a lot of money thrown at them to begin with), and then swoop in during the last cycles of recruiting to poach them away with little or no chance of getting caught up in a recruiting battle.

I don't see where throwing more money helps. I had 3 guys poached this time and one guy had $14k on him, one 10k and the last about 1500. It is still to be decided on the first 2 as they are yellow but how much is enough to protect them?

Posted by sleeper99 on 5/7/2013 1:59:00 PM (view original):scrodz's reasoning is on the same track as mine. like him. regardless of how it might implemented (my original suggestion is but one possibility), i'd like to see some (or more) tangible benefit for keeping a guy green over a period of time.

right now, a player can sit back, let other coaches spend and deplete their money on scouting and early recruiting battles, monitor recruits and watch for targets of opportunity (e.g., recruits that he suspects didn't have a lot of money thrown at them to begin with), and then swoop in during the last cycles of recruiting to poach them away with little or no chance of getting caught up in a recruiting battle.

according to how you phrased it above, the coach that is attempting to "poach" the recruit that he "suspects didn't have a lot of money thrown at them" is the one taking the risk. he has no idea how much $ or effort it will take to even turn the player yellow.

not really long distance but longer than what I like to go after. I try to stay under 250 miles With 500 being e exception, but neither of my DII teams had many players close. Out of the top 300 choices for a position I was lucky to find 1 or 2. 90% seemed to be 1000+. When I chose these schools I didn't think I would have to be going 1 and 2000 miles away. I mean Washington and Texas I thought were more fertile.

Posted by sleeper99 on 5/7/2013 1:59:00 PM (view original):scrodz's reasoning is on the same track as mine. like him. regardless of how it might implemented (my original suggestion is but one possibility), i'd like to see some (or more) tangible benefit for keeping a guy green over a period of time.

right now, a player can sit back, let other coaches spend and deplete their money on scouting and early recruiting battles, monitor recruits and watch for targets of opportunity (e.g., recruits that he suspects didn't have a lot of money thrown at them to begin with), and then swoop in during the last cycles of recruiting to poach them away with little or no chance of getting caught up in a recruiting battle.

according to how you phrased it above, the coach that is attempting to "poach" the recruit that he "suspects didn't have a lot of money thrown at them" is the one taking the risk. he has no idea how much $ or effort it will take to even turn the player yellow.

I don't think money matters that much I have 2 guys left and one was poached. I have 20 grand into him after this last CV. What is funny is my other guy has 12 grand into him and the freaking SIM is still hanging on.

and who do you think has more money at that point to throw at the recruit in any resulting battle? the coach who has been scouting and recruiting and battling for recruits early on, or the guy who has intentionally been waiting on the sidelines, saving his money and waiting to pounce?

look, this thread is going sideways. regardless of how you want to legalese the definition of poaching, there are players who save money until the later rounds of recruiting for the express purpose of going after another coach's recruits because they believe it gives them an advantage. are there risks? perhaps. but obviously the benefits clearly and substantially outweigh whatever nominal risks are said to exist. look at the situation. a non trivial number of the players are doing it, and they haven't been filling the forums with cautionary tales about how they got burned trying it. in fact, i haven't seen a one, and no one here defending the practice has given one. what i have seen, though, time and again are good players complaining about being burned time and again by people who do use the tactic. so the prima facie evidence would seem to point towards an imbalance in the v2 game engine that can and is being exploited.

so ...

the underlying and more fundamental question remains: should there be some measure of benefit to getting and holding a recruit green over time?